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News
Driving in the Smart City
Netlab director Kazys Varnelis recently spoke at the "Driving in the Smart City" session of the Smart City Expo in Barcelona to address issues of complexity and technology. You can watch a video of his talk at Vimeo.
A Manifesto for Looseness from Kazys Varnelis on Vimeo.
The Smart City in Barcelona
Netlab Director Kazys Varnelis will be speaking at the Smart City Expo in Barcelona on December 2 in a session on "Driving in the Smart City." Other speakers are Federico Casalegno, MIT, Richard Varos Jr of IBM, and Ashwin Manesh of Mapunity—Bangalore.
Complexity in Valparaiso
Netlab Director Kazys Varnelis spoke about the threat that technological and economic complexity pose at the International Geographical Union’s Megacity Task Force and the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María's Architecture Department's Megaciudades conference in Valparaiso, Chile on November 11.
Varnelis was interviewed about his talk by both the online journal Gravidad and the educational journal Noticias.
On Network Culture in the Straddler
Netlab Director Kazys Varnelis speaks about economics, cities, complexity, economics and network culture in the cover story of the online journal the Straddler.
Irish Architecture Now
Netlab Director Kazys Varnelis will be a responder to Irish Architecture Now, a panel featuring architects Merritt Bucholz and Karen McEvoy, Niall McCullough, and Shih-Fu Peng at the Rose Auditorium, The Cooper Union, September 26, 2011 at 6.30pm in New York City.
Architects from three leading contemporary Irish practices will present their work and discuss issues concerning Irish architecture as part of Irish Architecture Now—Ireland’s first ever architectural showcase in the U.S., which is part of Imagine Ireland, Culture Ireland’s year of Irish arts in America in 2011.
Merritt Bucholz and Karen McEvoy of Bucholz McEvoy Architects; Niall McCullough of McCullough Mulvin Architects; and Shih-Fu Peng of heneghan peng architects, are three of six firms touring the U.S. this autumn. The architects will discuss their practices and recent work in this symposium held at The Cooper Union and presented by the Architectural League. Raymund Ryan, Curator at the Heinz Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA curated the group and will provide the introduction.
Tickets are required for admission to League programs. Tickets are free for League members; $15 for non-members. Members may reserve a ticket by emailing: rsvp@archleague.org. Member tickets will be held at the check-in desk; unclaimed tickets will be released fifteen minutes after the start of the program. Non-members may purchase tickets here.
More at the League's Web Site or follow along with the Irish Architecture Now blog.
Advancing Architectural Research in Vilnius
Netlab Director Kazys Varnelis spoke on the work of the Netlab and the Columbia Studio-X global initiative in "Advancing Architectural Research" at Architekturos [Pokalbiu] Fondas on May 19. You can watch the talk (largely in English) below.
KAZYS VARNELIS from ARCHfondas on Vimeo.
Netlab Talks in Lithuania
Network Architecture Lab Director Kazys Varnelis will be speaking about research at the Netlab and about GSAPP's Studio-X global network in Lithuania this May. At 6pm on the 19th, Professor Varnelis will be speaking in Vilnius, Lithuania as part of a series of talks organized by ARCHITEKTŪROS [pokalbių] FONDAS on the topic of recent developments in education. His talk will focus on the Netlab and the Studio-X Global Network. The talk will be held at 8pm at the Nacionalinėje dailės galerijoje (National Art Gallery, NDG), Konstitucijos pr. 22, Vilnius. At 11am on the 20th at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, he will be speaking on the topic of "Network Culture and Space." The Network Architecture Lab is grateful to both the United States Embassy in Vilnius and KG Constructions for making this possible.
New City Reader at Columbia, 1/31/11
The New City Reader finishes its first run at an event at Columbia tonight, January 31, 2011, 6.30pm in Wood Auditorium of Avery Hall.
Richard Flood of the New Museum; Joseph Grima of Domus; Alan Rapp, Author / Editor; and Kazys Varnelis, Director of the Network Architecture Lab will discuss the brief life of the New City Reader, the first New York broadsheet to go under in 2011.
This closing event will be accompanied by the distribution of the last two sections, a front section and a local section, thus completing the New City Reader's run.
Announcing the New City Reader
The Network Architecture Lab announces the New City Reader, a newspaper on architecture, public space and the city, produced in collaboration with Joseph Grima and published as part of The Last Newspaper, an exhibition running at the New Museum from 6 October 2010‒9 January 2011.
The New City Reader will consist of one edition, published over the course of the project with a new section produced weekly by alternating guest editorial teams within the museum’s gallery space. These sections will be available free at the New Museum and—in emulation of a practice common in the nineteenth-century American city and still popular in parts of the world today—will be posted in public throughout the city for collective reading.
The New City Reader kicks off with a detailed graphic produced by the Netlab that recounts the 1977 New York City blackout and its effects on failing city to reveal the interdependence of infrastructure, information, and social stability. If the challenges of that era map to the difficulties facing both the country and the city today, the New City Reader will inquire into these parallels.
Conceived by Joseph Grima (Domus) and Kazys Varnelis (Netlab), this newspaper’s content derive- from a series of discussions, debates, interviews, and research into the spatial implications of epochal shifts in technology, economy, and society today. Each issue of the New City Reader will be guest edited by a contributing network of architects, theorists, and research groups who will bring their particular expertise to bear on the sections.
The guest contributing networks include:
| City | Network Architecture Lab |
| Editorial | New City Reader Editorial Staff |
| Culture | School of Visual Arts D-Crit Program |
| Sports | Jeannie Kim and Hunter Tura |
| Entertainment | Beatriz Colomina and Program for Media and Modernity |
| Food | Park (Will Prince, Krista Ninivaggi) and Nicola Twilley |
| Real Estate | Sideprojects (Mabel Wilson + Peter Tolkin) |
| Business | Frank Pasquale and Kevin Slavin |
| Legal | Eyal Weizman, Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London |
| Local | Nugu (Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas) and Saskia Sassen |
| Politics | common room |
| Style | Robert Sumrell and Andrea Ching |
| Music | DJ Enron and DJ Rupture |
| Science | David Benjamin and Livia Corona |
| Weather | C-Lab (Jeffrey Inaba) |
| Obituaries | MOS (Michael Meredith) |
| Classifieds | Leagues and Legions |
Joseph Grima is the current editorial director of Domus magazine and the former director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. Kazys Varnelis is an historian, the director of the Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and a co-founder of AUDC.
Sponsors include The New Museum, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Joe and Nina Day, Anonymous Donors, and the Willametta K. Day Foundation.
Netlab Ties for First to Build a Better Burb
The Network Architecture Lab (in collaboration with Park) tied for first in the Build a Better Burb ideas competition with Long Division, its project to reimagine Long Island for the twenty-first century.
Sponsored by the Long Island Index, a project of the Rauch Foundation, Build a Better Burb set out to identify solutions for making suburbs better, more sustainable places to live. The Long Division entry began with the premise that a regional planning strategy—together with local architectural interventions in the form of new hybrid building types—is essential.
On a regional level, we sought to preserve Long Island's aquifer—a vast resource under threat from an over-developed environment—by suggesting that a regional planning authority might selectively void areas in the eastern part of the island that sit on top of the aquifer, are underserved by infrastructure, and are populated by an aging population. Here we proposed the long term use of eminent domain, tax incentives, and other prods to encourage individuals to move into denser housing in town centers while the resulting voids would be turned over to boutique organic agricultural production compatible with the aquifer together with nature preserves and other aquifer-friendly uses.
In the already-dense western part of the island we propose to further densify city centers, deploying a set of new hybrid building types based on demographic needs and interests. We drew inspiration for these large structures from architect Victor Gruen's development of the shopping mall, a product of the suburbs and perhaps the last genuinely new building type but incorporated a variety of uses for varied populations. To intensify the density in these city centers, we introduced new parkland in less dense residential areas through strategic voiding of less desirable properties so as to allow these overbuilt suburbs to have breathing room.
Please see the video at Vimeo below, together with a pdf booklet on our work here.
Netlab members contributing to this project were Kazys Varnelis, Netlab Director; Leigha Dennis, Project Lead; Momo Araki, Alexis Burson, and Kyle Hovenkotter. We would like to thank Will Prince of Park for his invaluable contributions.
Long Division from Kazys Varnelis on Vimeo.
Project lead Leigha Dennis speaks to a television news reporter at the awards ceremony.